Vote on 5am Treasury Withdrawal

I am voting YES on the governance action with hash aaa6d9ccb72639c77db46b73bec2eaff9e5fcdfa04909cf1a0f7855a4d31485a#0.

The metadata for my vote is located here, and this blog serves as a more human-readable form of that justification.

Justification

First, I have no known conflict of interest that prevents me from voting on this proposal. Sundae Labs is not involved in any of these ventures as a contractor or beneficiary. We have had some early discussions about whether Gummiworm would be a good fit for some of the infrastructure layer for this proposal, but the conversations have gone no further than initial discussions at BuidlerFest and my vote is not contingent in any way on how those conversations progress.

I was on the fence about this proposal for two primary reasons:

1. Commercial terms; I believe that when we fund commercial ventures from the treasury, it should include explicit repayment or revenue share terms, beyond just the transaction fees they will generate. Transaction fees are table stakes, and are already paying for the network infrastructure that processes them, so considering them as repayment for deployed capital is double-counting their utility.
2. Lack of technical and business clarity; Despite the 45 page proposal (which I did read), I was left murky on the exact business value captured by this protocol. Perhaps this is a case of the authors being in the weeds enough that the value is obvious, or perhaps this is a case of “less is more” and the sheer size of the document muddled what could have been made much clearer in less words, I was left only with a vague sense of “data anchored on Cardano and something something marketplace for that data”.
3. Several people reached out to me to encourage me to vote on this. It may seem silly, but I really don’t like to be hounded about my vote. Whether I vote, and how I vote, is between me and my delegators. If you want to talk to me about my vote, show me that you are a delegator.

In the end though, the following facts won me over to a yes vote:

1. The infrastructure already built is fairly substantial, with 22,000 transactions already on chain.
2. The projected 112m transactions, though likely overly optimistic, would represent roughly 4.48m ADA in revenue for the treasury, bringing the total cost of this down to only 5.02m ADA.
3. We have heavily funded infrastructure, and I have been a very loud and vocal advocate of funding adoption alongside that infrastructure. This seems to be a very real attempt at doing so, with a path to sustainability that makes this capital expenditure, rather than operational expenditure.

If the proposal doesn’t pass, and the team would like to submit a revised proposal, I think that explicit repayment terms and better business clarity (you should be able to describe the value flow in a single, word-light diagram-heavy page), would dramatically strengthen the proposal for most DReps.